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Herbert Cahoon, 82, Curator at Morgan Library

Herbert T. F. Cahoon, a curator who presided over the collection of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library for 35 years, died on Sunday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 82.

The library is one of the world's major repositories of such papers, and the handwritten words of many of history's most famous authors and composers passed through Mr. Cahoon's hands. The manuscript holdings expanded considerably during his tenure from 1954 to 1989.

Under Mr. Cahoon, major acquisitions included the Mary Flagler Cary music collection in 1968. The collection, which Mr. Cahoon said had been hidden away in Mrs. Cary's Fifth Avenue apartment for years, included original copies of Brahms's First Symphony and Beethoven's ''Ghost'' Trio, among many other renowned works by the likes of Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Verdi.

The Cary collection was of particular interest to music scholars because the originals often indicated changes that came later in the compositions.

Mr. Cahoon helped acquire numerous books, letters and other texts for the library, which houses up to 150,000 separate manuscripts ranging from single letters to poems to the original versions of novels.

The texts he added included a draft in pencil of ''The Little Prince'' as well as drawings by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Among other manuscripts Mr. Cahoon helped acquire were ''Travels with Charley,'' donated by its author, John Steinbeck, in 1962, and a missing volume of the journals of Thoreau found in 1956, completing a set that J. Pierpont Morgan had bought in 1909.

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He joined the Morgan in 1954 after 14 years at the New York Public Library, where he last served as the assistant director of the rare book division. Born in West Chatham, Mass., in 1918, he received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1940 and a degree in library science from Columbia University in 1941.

He was the author of a book of poetry, ''Thanatopsis,'' published in 1949. He also collaborated on an extensive bibliography of James Joyce.

At the Morgan, Mr. Cahoon organized dozens of exhibitions and wrote the catalogs for some. He developed a fondness for French and English literary manuscripts and pursued the 18th- and 19th-century letters of the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a specialist in the art of writing about food.

Mr. Cahoon is survived by his friend, W. Miller Wilcox of New York, and a niece, Mrs. H. Brackett Hall, and a nephew, Richard Sturges, both of Hyannisport, Mass.

Mr. Cahoon was known for unearthing interesting, obscure tidbits from the world of old letters. While organizing a show on Michelangelo in 1979, he detailed several menus of fish, pasta and soup that refuted the accepted idea that Michelangelo had subsisted on bread and wine.

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A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on May 17, 2000, on Page C00026 of the National edition with the headline: Herbert Cahoon, 82, Curator at Morgan Library. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe